Poetic Mycography and Mycelial Dérives in John Cage: Towards an Ecocentric Creative Practice

I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom. (Cage 1954, Music Lovers, a Field Companion) John Cage was an interdisciplinarian: composer, poet, philosopher, artist, and, perhaps surprisingly, a mycologist. The study of mycology considers the invisible ubiquity and ephemerality of spores, their multi-cellular hyphae which branch in indeterminate networks, and are ‘the tissue that holds together much of the world’ (Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2020). These mycological principles manifest in Cage’s poetics in ideas of transience and dissipation, indeterminacy, and the democratising of ‘everyday’, intramundane sounds, words, as music and as poetry to bring prominence to the ambient and de-emphasise the ego. While foraging for mushrooms is a chance procedure, it is a process that is bound by rules; one must not select the poisonous mushroom to eat. Similarly, Cage’s creative practice is one of process and procedure and out of these constraint-based forms, unanticipated textual derives and aleatoric paths through textual matter emerge. This chapter is a creative-critical autoethnographic negotiation between the anthropocentric self, or ego, the natural world, and underground and unseen ecologies. As Sheldrake puts it, ‘we are all entangled’ (2020). It is this co-dependant entanglement that nurtures a mycographic fluidity between formal poetic practices, and between disciplines: between poetry, music, natural science, which inform or establish a starting point for further interdisciplinary, ecotonal spaces and a new way of reading relationships between art and science, between us and the world.